Need Marketing Help? Call 214-267-9553

Request For Proposal

I recently read a comment by Danny Sullivan (a well respected expert in the search marketing industry) via Marty’s blog post, titled What the Hell is SEO Now Anyway? . Danny’s comment was as follows:

So SEO is for search engines — it’s just that people often limit the definition of search engines to mean something with a search box and/or Google. Instead, it’s anything that allows people to find something. SEOs understand how to show up in the free listings provided in such places. Search marketers understand how to show up in either the free or paid listings.

Simple as that.

Danny is totally right. I find that so many SEOs tend to try to make SEO (which like Mark Jackson from Vizion Interactive in Dallas once said: Search is a verb.) a product centric or search engine focus. SEO is now SEM. SEM is Search Engine Marketing. SEM consists of Paid Search (or Pay-Per-Click) and Organic search optimization (or natural search engine optimization. SEM is an acronym that includes both paid and organic, and it now also encompasses other aspects of search including social media.

SEO has changed. Facebook is not really a “search engine.” Yet at the same token the benefits of having a Search Engine Marketer to consult and plan a marketing strategy for Facebook, now the World’s 2nd most popular site behind Google, is imperative. If your business is ignoring the marketing power of Facebook, you need to get on board. Social media is here to stay. So are the benefits of an SEO Guru and even more so the benefits of a Holistic Search Engine Marketer.

For many years I have been “preaching” the benefits of a holistic search engine marketing strategy. Just as search engines were once considered fragmented from many sites with no clear defined industry leader, now it seems that Google is managed to create a dominance in search volume by providing the highest quality search results for queries. Local search is extremely fragmented, and I believe that as Google continues dominance in search, it will also become the dominant player in “Local Search.”

Until Google has THE MONOPOLY on Search by being #1 in every vertical, such as Auto Search (Autotrader), News Search (Fox News), Finance Search (MarketWatch), Video Search (YouTube) , Image Search (Google Images), Local Search (CitySearch/YP.com), Shopping Search (Ebay), Review Search (Yelp.com), Real Estate Search (Zillow) and all the other hundreds of different kinds of search sites, you will continue to need a Search Engine Marketer more-so than a Search Engine Optimizer or SEO Guru.